Holidays

Its been a busy week - I went to dads house - my childhood home and did a small archeological dig in the back yard - cataloging what and where i found objects. It was based on an idea i saw when i was at the TATE modern where the artist Mark Dion organised a dig on the banks of the Thames catalouging what he found:

The exhibition organized these objects according to location in a large mahogany cabinet, alongside photographs of the beachcombers and tidal flow charts, classifying them loosely according to type (such as bones, glassware, pottery, metal objects), in seemingly unhistorical and largely unexplained arrangements: antique items were shown alongside contemporary items, ephemera and detritus were next to objects of value. At all stages, the artist and his assistants took on the role of actors in a form of public theatre, inviting all onlookers to question their own ideas about archaeology, scientific classification, relationships, and knowledge of the past.

http://edu.warhol.org/app_dion.html

I took some photos at dads as i was excavating - but today I want to clean, re-photograph and catalouge the objects and work in the studio tomorrow looking at the best way to display them - at the moment I'm thinking in small cardboard boxes that are devided up - one for each strata location?

I guess what had sparked this investigation into the past as a path to memory was sparked when i read a book on Christian Boltanski by Lynn Grumpet - I wrote the following passage in my diary when I read it but forgot about it till Alice (whom I share a studio with) borrowed the book and marked the same passage for me.

- its in relation to a box of old family photographs (not his family though) that he found and was looking at ways of investigating the family delvign into their lives but as he went on he "Realised that these images were only a witness to a collective ritual - they didn't teach us anything about the family....but sent us back into our own past"